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By Root 631 0

church of Egypt began the destruction of the pagan monuments and inscriptions. The language passed from the knowledge of men, and the hieroglyphs became a source of wild speculation and mystical theorizing. The wisdom of Egypt would become a legend, but its learning was lost beneath the weight of twenty centuries of dust and ignorance. Yet still today the forested pillars of Karnak trumpet the name of Ramses to men and women from lands that the conqueror never knew existed, and until the last stone falls from the sides of the Great Pyramid of Giza, men will marvel at the might and the presumption of its builder.

A goodly number of books on archaeological subjects end with resounding sentences like that last one. There is a perfectly good reason for the popularity of the theme. The physical survival of the great Egyptian monuments is a noteworthy phenomenon in itself, when one considers that most of the other civilizations of comparable antiquity are visible to us only as mud-brick-foundation outlines, or as verbal reconstructions. Structures such as the pyramids, the Karnak temple, and the temples of Philae, Abu Simbel, and Abydos would be astonishing even if they were not so old; in size and magnificence they compare favorably with the ruins of almost any other past culture that is known to us.

Still, I have a prejudice against an emphasis of this type; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I have a predilection in favor of another sort of emphasis. The tombs, the temples, the golden coffins of Tutankhamon, are exciting and dramatic, yet they have not so much fascination for me as have other, less tangible, contacts with an antique and alien world. My interest in archaeology was stimulated initially by the lure of buried treasure; but eventually I found myself allured by the ideas of the past even more than by its artifacts. And this development led to another, very personal and perhaps subjective, discovery. People who read and write about history, particularly about ancient history, are wont to marvel at the “unexpectedly modern” sound of an ancient institution or expression. I do it myself, and I enjoy the small thrill of recognition which results from such an encounter. Yet in a broader sense the works of the past to which our emotions respond are not “ancient” or “modern,” not “Egyptian” or “American,” but simply—human. The specific expression of a given motivation may be one which our society no longer uses or accepts; but it may be completely valid for the culture in which it operates, and as we come to understand other elements of that culture we will see, behind the unfamiliar facade of exotic custom, human urges that should be as recognizable as our own features in a mirror.

This is not to disparage, nor to disregard, the uniqueness of history. The richness and variety of the attempted solutions to man’s numerous problems are marvelous and appalling, and a lifetime is not long enough to begin to comprehend their manifold complexities. This unending diversity is one of the attractions of historical study, and the glamour of exotic custom is another. Egyptian mortuary practices, to take a single example, have understandably intrigued students for generations: the process of mummification, the elaborate tomb, the magical rite, the rich equipment of the dead. As we read the descriptions of the fantastic tombs, we marvel at the ingenuity of their builders, who provided for every conceivable mishap that might befall the naked soul wandering through darkness toward immortality. How richly grotesque—how bizarre—was the spiritual world which these long-dead aliens envisaged!

And then we come upon a single sentence, or an isolated phrase, and the mask of ceremonial vanishes to expose the familiar poignancy of man’s quest for immortality, with all its uncertainty and its aching desire. “No one has returned from there to tell us how they fare.”

The lament for a dead child, the demand for justice, the lover’s yearning for his beloved—before our recognition of the universality of human emotion, time and distance